U.S. National Parks and Indigenous Dispossession in the Progressive Era

• In Event: Indigenous Politics and Policy

Abstract

In American culture U.S. national parks are often depicted as apolitical spaces of pristine wilderness that endure outside of existing political structures. The question of the role of culture and institutions in American political development has been widely debated in the field of U.S. politics. American political development scholars, such as Victoria Hattam have emphasized the role of race and culture in U.S. institutions. By contrast scholars, such as Ian Tyrrell have made powerful arguments for the importance of national parks and conceptualizations of nature in Progressive Era political development. However, these works have not adequately addressed the issue of how Indigenous dispossession of the land is fundamental to how U.S. national parks’ function as a political institution. My paper remedies this gap by analyzing U.S. national parks as a political institution that circulates settler colonial logics.

Specifically, in my project I explore U.S. national parks’ emergence in the context of Progressive Era state-building projects in a critique of American political development. This period is commonly seen as accomplishing great political reform that addressed various issues arising from the American Industrial Revolution. In particular, the Progressive Era saw the emergence of urban parks in an effort to maintain social order and pacify an increasingly precarious working class, as well as national parks as tourist destinations for weary, cosmopolitan Americans to briefly escape mass industrialization and urbanization. My project tracks the history of the U.S. National Parks Service as a political institution of the Progressive Era. In doing so, I reconstruct the National Parks Service’s deployment of the concepts of nature, recreation, and national identity in relation to settler colonial discourse and legacies of Indigenous dispossession.

Through such an analysis I argue that the emergence of the U.S. national parks was not only a central aspect of Progressive Era reforms, but that it was also a political institution that constituted white American settler subjectivity through a disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. White American settler subjects’ capacity to know the self are inextricably linked to settler colonial discourse, Indigenous dispossession, and the mechanisms that discipline bodies and order their relationships to the land. In this way the National Parks Service, as a political institution, facilitates how subjectivities are shaped through their interactions with(in) national parks. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining the U.S. national parks in American political development, sheds new light on the neglected issue of the centrality of Indigenous dispossession of the land in U.S. institutions.

Author

• Sarah Stach, University of Oregon